


Continuity of Government

by Bobsled_Hostage



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Community: falloutkinkmeme, F/M, Pregnancy, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 23:30:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7075183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobsled_Hostage/pseuds/Bobsled_Hostage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She stuck out, pretty much everywhere we went. Like she was from a different time. A better time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Mojave was a pit. Oh, she knew on some intellectual level that the people here grew up with it, thought the violence and filth and grime and the lack of even the most basic comforts of civilization were just facts of life. But every bombed out shell of a building, every raider trying to fuck or eat her, every sun baked, sandblasted step she took made her long for the ordered security of Navarro. For air conditioned corridors and soft white fluorescent lights, for whirring electronics and sterile, sealed labs. For television and mai tais and antibiotics. For a future for humanity, and a dream of an America worth living in.

After a year or two of drifting, she found Vegas.

 

What a senseless waste. So much money, so much water and power and so many man-hours, all wasted on kitsch and sleaze, keeping the booze and the sex and the drugs flowing. All the parts of America he could have saved, and he chose _this._ But, Vegas is the only place in the Mojave hiring programmers, even if her expertise is a little outside what they’re looking for. It isn’t writing drivers for a new laser turret and it isn’t debugging cybernetic machine learning algorithms, but working IT at The Tops keeps the lights on and the hot water running in her one-bedroom. Leaves her with enough money for a few small luxuries to remind her of what she left behind. Of what they took away. A lost looking NCR soldier on leave offers to buy her a drink one night, and she’s just sloshed enough to accept

She really shouldn’t have married him. Bald, short, an atrocious conversationalist, and worst of all, an NCR soldier. A dimwitted thug of the bastard cargo cult that swept away the last hope of a restored United States, pissing on the fading embers of the American dream. But she’d forgotten how nice it felt to have someone look at her with nothing but genuine devotion. To have a man who admired her and waited on her and wanted every part of her. And when she was with him she felt a little like she was back home, with concrete and steel and earth and power armored soldiers between her and the world. Yes, it was childish, but she felt _safe_ around him. Sometimes when they went out she’d even leave her her needler tucked under her mattress instead of carrying it with her. And, she supposed, he wasn’t all that awful to look at, in the end. So, she gave in to his repeated insinuations about military benefits and tax credits for settlers and asked him if he was just idly bringing the point forward again and again (which he most certainly wasn’t), or if he was serious. He proposed to her right there, to which she agreed. On one condition.

\---

She did feel the tiniest bit guilty about demanding that he leave 1st Recon, but anything else would have been too much. Every time they fucked, which was often, a part of her had screamed that she was spitting on her mother’s grave. Another wasteland whore spreading her legs for NCR dick and a handful of bills, not payable in specie. Marrying a _former_ NCR soldier was at least a step up. And this way she didn’t have to worry about him eating a bullet shooting at savages across the river. They listened to Mister New Vegas describing the latest news from Legion territory on the radio as they packed up their things and set out for Novac. One of his army buddies invited the pair of them there, and she’d had more than her fill of gangsters and hookers and tacky neon glitz. A change of scenery sounded almost refreshing.  
  
Big mistake.  
  
Novac was a godawful, depressing little hole. Carla knew from books that even before the war, living out of a motel was reserved for the absolute dregs of society, and it appeared that hundreds of years later, not much had changed. She loathed Jeannie May Crawford. Hated her attitude, how she thought this particular scrap of wasteland was somehow an improvement over the others, how her ‘town’ was anything but yet another pack of scavengers crawling around yet another pile of rubble. And Manny Vargas, Christ she couldn’t _stand_ Manny, always whining about how she was the one who’d taken his best friend away (of course he never came out and said it, but she knew it’s what he _really_ meant).  
  
When, during a conversation on the balcony, Daisy Whitman mentioned offhand having once been a pilot, Carla thought maybe, just maybe, things might work out ok. Of course the old prospector had nervously denied any connection to the restored United States, but when pressed, plied with the right codephrases and miniscule details only a fellow Navarro native would have known, her face lit up with recognition. Carla was, for once, ecstatic. This dump, of all places, and there was finally someone she could talk to. Someone who understood, who _remembered._ Someone who felt the loss of the last bastion of civilization, and of her home, as keenly as she did. Whispering excitedly in the mostly-secure confines of Daisy’s room, the two laughed and joked and reminisced and told stories long into the night. When she left, it was with an invitation to accompany the aged vertibird jockey on her next trip to the abandoned rocket factory.  
  
The next day, she learned that she was pregnant. The future seemed a little brighter all around.


	2. Chapter 2

The overclocked Robco mainframe Carla had installed in their room whined loudly as it computed time/survivor curves for the latest simulation she’d written. Craig had taken to complaining that the thing transformed their suite into a furnace, and she had trouble arguing with his assessment most of the time. Unfortunately for him, his wife was gravid to the point that she could no longer trek from town to ruin to junkyard in search of interesting components for her projects, leaving fiddling with her existing collection as her only outlet. It was a temporary problem, either way. Soon they’d be moved into a bigger place, and the computers and machines would have a room all to themselves to heat up. She sat, sweating in nothing but shorts and a tank top, munching a snack cake and waiting for results. In maybe half an hour her husband’s shift would end, and return to he’d rub her feet while they argued comfortably over what they’d name the baby. Whether they'd keep the crib in their room or build a nursery.

A knock came from outside, a series of distinctive taps indicating that Daisy had returned with the parts she’d asked for. Standing with both hands pressed to the small of her back, Carla groaned and stretched, before waddling to the door to greet her friend.

The men waiting outside were not Daisy. She quickly wished she hadn’t left her needler on the table by the keyboard.

\---

Carla knelt, collared, naked and hugely pregnant, while a plumed and gaudily attired savage trod the boards of the auction platform, pointing out with atavistic glee the various features of her anatomy to a raucous crowd of filthy men clad in salvaged athletic equipment. The NCR had been pathetic, but this, this was appalling. She wished she could dig up that cunt Tandi, drag her out her and scream in her face: _This is what happens! This is what we were fighting, and now you’re too fucking weak to do it yourself! We could have scorched them from the face of the planet with one vertibird! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?_ If this is where ‘civilization’ was headed, she wasn’t planning on hanging around to watch the steady downhill slide firsthand. Damned if she was going to spend the rest of her days sucking some sweaty tribal’s hairy cock while her son grew up to be a caveman, smearing things with shit and fighting over scraps of aluminum. That is, if these fucking barbarians didn’t just eat him. Sure, she could hope to die in labor, like half their women probably did, but given the choice she’d rather die with someone besides her screaming in agony. But then, anything would be preferable to sticking around in a world where-

Something glinted on the canyon face, far far away. She squinted, face burning with humiliation and helpless rage. Stories he’d told her, half recollected, of snipers given away by the light bouncing off their telescopic sights. Holding her head up as straight as she could, she looked directly at the tiny pinpoint of reflected sun, through the shimmering heat, ignoring the horde of savages and their prurient catcalls. She smiled just a little, in spite of herself, hoping it really was him. Hoping he could see her face one last time when he squeezed the trigger. She mouthed silently, hoping his high power scope would let him see the words on her cracked, bruised lips:

_Goodbye, I l-_

The round struck her slightly below the forehead, killing her several seconds before she heard the shot. The last thing to pass through her brain before the bullet was that maybe, just maybe, there was hope for humanity yet.

**Author's Note:**

> My prompt when I autofilled this on the kink meme was
> 
> 'Carla Boone is variously described as looking like she was from another time and place, as disliking the overall squalor of Novac and the wasteland, and as pressuring her husband to leave the NCR military.
> 
> What if Carla was like Arcade, a survivor from the Enclave? What if she had a different attitude about the 'evil fascist paramilitary organization' than he did? What if she missed it and wasn't too happy with the NCR, Brotherhood and the Chosen One for destroying her home?'


End file.
